The word author comes all the way from Latin. In Latin, there was the auctor that carried the meanings of the promoter, producer, father, progenitor, founder, trustworthy writer.
It is undoubtedly a powerful word, and It spread all to the middle-age English in the same form. The authors have always been regarded as worthy of admiration. More than their deeds, their texts, authors are remembered as creators of the ideas.
Back then, the whole writing business looked very different from now. The author wasn’t the one writing the text. He was the one who sat and pondered the idea, while a scribe or scripture was the one with the responsibility of writing it down. Every author was a philosopher in a sense, and we can still see that connection even today.
Things are a little different today. Literacy or the ability to read and write is considered a human skill, almost a human right.
Two things have structured the world in this way: the printing revolution and the digital revolution. The digital revolution amplified that by the immeasurable. Soon we were able to communicate with anyone anywhere.
That made us all writers.
Being a writer means that you are able to share your author’s ideas with the world, and offer solutions. Which is why you need to be able to stand behind every word you write.
It wasn’t a certain job; only a few, often selected individuals were involved in, it became the precondition to communication. And the need for professional writers only grew. From bureaucrats to stenographers, and soon enough, blogs started popping up everywhere.
If you are running a blog or a website or maybe looking to earn some money, you should ask yourself – Are you a writer, or are you an author?
Be an Author, Claim Your Authority
The difference between the author and the writer has already been mentioned. The author is the originator of the idea; the writer is the author’s elongated right hand. The author speaks, and the writer listens.
And finally, the author is the “keeper of the word.” He is the one that has authority over it, and he is the one that also gives authority to the word. A word that is vouched for has more power.
If you are trying to make money from a blog or a website, you must be trying to solve a problem. Blogs that are stand-ins for diaries might be very important; the key to business is usefulness.
In today’s business, blogs are used to build brand reputation and trustworthiness. If your blog can offer advice on solving a problem, then your product must be able to solve it!
And when it comes to advice, there are some things than work than others. Like the fact that people will listen to advice coming from personal experiences, be it experience with a problem, or experience in a field.
This is where your word as the author directly benefits your client and your bottom line.
The Simple Author Box Plugin
This is where the author box plugin comes in crucially handy. What better way to sate your authorship than with a designated author area linked to your text.
You have probably already seen it on different news portals or blogs you follow. It is a box usually located beneath the text that contains an image and some information about the author.
This is an already established way of stating authorship, and readers will easily recognize it and get the message.
The WordPress team has developed an author box plugin called “Simple Author Box.” It is one of the most widely used author box plugins.
There is a free and premium plugin. The free one you can find in your usual “Add new” menu in the “Plugins” category in your WordPress dashboard.
Just like any other plugin, once you download it, you will need to activate it. After activation, it will open a new menu in your dashboard called “Simple Author” with a little box icon.
Once you open it, you will see the author box with “John Doe” as the author, and a text in Latin (told you so).
Above it, three buttons will be located: “Edit Author Profile,” “Change Author Avatar,” “Add/Edit Social Media Icons.” Clicking on each one will open a new window, but they all actually redirect you to the same page, the “Profile” menu.
To change the author name, you need to write your name in the “Nickname” box and then set it at the “Display name publicly as” menu.
At the bottom of the page, you can set your social media icons. The great thing about Simple Author Box is that it allows you to add over 30 social media links. The only thing to keep an eye on is to choose the appropriate platform for each link; otherwise, your icons will get mixed up.
When you return back to the Simple Author’s first page beneath the box, you will have your customizable options and functional settings.
The settings menu controls different functionalities. Here you can choose to insert the author box manually, which is what we recommend. You will find the shortcode in the settings, and just paste it at the bottom of the text. You can also insert it by choosing it as a kind of block in your paragraph.
You can also choose to set your social media icons to open in different tabs, rather than redirect you from the one you are reading.
You have seven different color changing options, everything from author box links to boarders. Also, seven different options for changing the typography of the author box.
And finally, you can choose to load an inline style to the footer at the miscellaneous menu. And the far right, you will find the link to the upgrade option in red.
Simple Author Box PRO
The premium version is great if you are running a blog with other authors or are doing partnerships.
The biggest advantage of the premium version is the ability to add multiple authors to the plugin or set certain authors as guests. This can come in very handy, especially if you are running a kind of news or reporting website service.
The premium version can be edited from the block settings by using the Gutenberg block. The Gutenberg block helps you create content in a more visual way, which is very useful when trying to set up an author box.
Simple Author Box Pro features more color scheme options and more widgets you can use, and another added feature is the ability to set your links to open in a nofollow manner.
The nofollow link option means that when someone clicks on your link, Google will not add that click-through to that page ranking. Social media platforms get enough traffic as it is, so this can be useful if you don’t want to give them more. That way, you can save some for yourself.
The prices for the premium version vary solely depending on the number of websites you want to use them on.
- The “Agency” tariff supports 30 different sites and costs 499$ a year.
- The “Trio” one supports three different sites, costs 69$ a year and is the most popular one.
- The final one, the “Mono” supports, you guessed it, only one website. But, hey, you got to start somewhere. It costs 29$ a year.
The team assures a 100% money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied with the plugin over a period of 14 days. This is great if you are just starting to branch out and thinking about taking the “Trio” tariff to run the author box on multiple sites.
I hope we have made a compelling enough case for using the author box plugin. It is a must if you want to leave a strong impression on your potential readers.
Maybe if you are creative enough, you can make your own one-off authorship statement, but seeing how the author box has become a staple of the craft, it is going to be hard to do.
The Simple Author Box plugin has everything you need to stand both behind and in front of your content.
Good luck, and keep writing!